Passenger etiquette?

[theironroad]

As the title of this thread is passenger etiquette, I would just like to say a big thank you to the guy who sat in front of me on a train recently and proceeded to eat the most foul smelling food I've ever had the displeasure to inhale. I would also like to thank him for forcing me not just to change seats but to change carriage.
Never mind etiquette, some people couldn't give a damn about others.

What was he eating?

 

[Clayton]

Until it breaks. I get the feeling of some of these things being technology for technology's sake...

You could swipe your ticket on the sensors to ‘check in’ to your seat, probably not hard to implement

 

[_toommm_]

You could swipe your ticket on the sensors to ‘check in’ to your seat, probably not hard to implement

Magnetic strips, the most reliable of the railway's current technologies...

 

[yorksrob]

How would anyone know that the train was stuffed with advance ticket holders, rather than standard ticket holders? If it really was stuffed with advance ticket holders, that means there are too many advance tickets available. Does it even matter what tickets people have anyway? If the train is standing room only then you have to stand, deal with it or use an alternative mode of transport. I would consider it infinitesimally unlikely that anyone would stop using a train specifically because of the number of advance ticket holders taking up seats. There are plenty of better reasons to stop using the train out of frustration and drive instead. Screaming kids and poor personal hygiene are annoyances that come with traveling by train, full stop, you have to accept things like that occasionally if you are going to use public transport regularly.

Yes, its not an easy metric to understand.

I more or less stopped using a train companie's services because too many seats were reserved and I consequently didn't have enough choice over where I sat. I know that company had a lot of AP, but I don't know what proportion. I tend to use a different company instead where I'll get more choice of seat, but using AP anyway !

 

[DavidGrain]

I once saw a XC Birmingham-Cardiff 2 car unit (which might have come through from Nottingham) go past me with what appeared to be nearly every seat reserved with paper tickets on the seat backs. Mind you my experience with this service is that it pays you to reserve a seat as the trains always seem to have standing passengers.

 

[atraindriver]

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[_toommm_]

I got off a (full) LNER train at Grantham last week owing to a child of that age basically having a meltdown in the vestibule because he wanted to stay with granddad at Newark and not go home to mummy.
The next train was also full-and-standing, but at least didn't have a screaming child!

My worst ever trip was a train from Nottingham to Lincoln with a wheelchair in the dedicated space which is basically behind the cab on a 156. The lass in the chair was 14, but apparently had a mental age of about 2 and she screamed continually for the whole journey. I didn't have the option of moving to another seat, as I was driving the train...

Autism? Aspergers? Learning difficulties? Just because someone is physically one age, doesn't mean they're mentally that age.

 

[atraindriver]

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[trainophile]

Interesting point about the safety aspect of a driver being constantly distracted by something like that. Strange place to put the wheelchair space really.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Why would a system as simple as that (a sort of scale in fact) break (easily) ? It doesn't happen on cars, and car seats aren't particularly well looked after.

Car seats are typically sat on about 4 times a day and people generally look after premium cars (the kind that have this kind of feature) well as they tend to be a prized possession.

Train seats are none of those things, sat on potentially over a hundred times a day and maintained as cheaply as possible.

 

[Bletchleyite]

You could swipe your ticket on the sensors to ‘check in’ to your seat, probably not hard to implement

Why have all these complex features when you can just mark an area of the train as reserved and make it so easy to get reservations right up to departure that nobody in their right mind wouldn't unless they were already gone?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Interesting point about the safety aspect of a driver being constantly distracted by something like that. Strange place to put the wheelchair space really.

As most autistic people (and any others who by virtue of a disability tend to make loud noises uncontrollably) are not in wheelchairs this is neither here nor there, it would rather seem to suggest that the cab requires an improved level of sound insulation from the passenger area. Or that, as I've said before, the "silent cab" needs to go away and drivers need to be allowed to listen to music or similar.

 

[Eccles1983]

As most autistic people (and any others who by virtue of a disability tend to make loud noises uncontrollably) are not in wheelchairs this is neither here nor there, it would rather seem to suggest that the cab requires an improved level of sound insulation from the passenger area. Or that, as I've said before, the "silent cab" needs to go away and drivers need to be allowed to listen to music or similar.

Eh?

I assume you make this statement in a position of actual experience or knowledge.

Music? Not a chance. At night when it is pea soup all around outside the last thing I would want is music.

Driving trains is done by using more than just the eyes, you need to listen to the engine, the ride and sounds of rails and point work and importantly the aws/vigilance.

Why would anyone want to enable another distraction such as music to it?

 

[_toommm_]

As most autistic people (and any others who by virtue of a disability tend to make loud noises uncontrollably) are not in wheelchairs this is neither here nor there, it would rather seem to suggest that the cab requires an improved level of sound insulation from the passenger area. Or that, as I've said before, the "silent cab" needs to go away and drivers need to be allowed to listen to music or similar.

Listen to music, and miss the sound of the AWS horn? Or miss a critical sound like something hitting the train that they didn't see before?

 

[Bletchleyite]

Listen to music, and miss the sound of the AWS horn? Or miss a critical sound like something hitting the train that they didn't see before?

Improved concentration would outweigh any of that in my view, and if ERTMS replaced AWS the horn wouldn't be there anyway.

 

[TRAX]

Car seats are typically sat on about 4 times a day and people generally look after premium cars (the kind that have this kind of feature) well as they tend to be a prized possession.

Train seats are none of those things, sat on potentially over a hundred times a day and maintained as cheaply as possible.

All cars have that feature. Otherwise the no-belt-attached light would flash all the time if the seat is empty.

 

[Bletchleyite]

All cars have that feature. Otherwise the no-belt-attached light would flash all the time if the seat is empty.

Not all cars have a no-belt-attached light. Mine doesn't.

Some only check the driver's belt.

 

[atraindriver]

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[FGW_DID]

I was on 800305 this morning (1P12 Hereford - Paddington), the seat reservation ‘traffic light’ system was actually up & running.
Between Oxford & Reading, out of 6 seats showing ‘Red - unavailable’ there were only two occupied. The other 4 were unoccupied the entire time I was in that carriage.

The seat in front of me had a yellow light with “available to Oxford, unavailable between Oxford & Paddington”, this clicked to red as we came to a stand in the platform at Oxford. This seat was still unoccupied by Reading. I suspect as this was the second coach from the rear and quite well down the Platform, the person concerned probably just boarded the first coach nearest the ticket barrier / doors and plonked themselves in to the first seat they found.

 

[Esker-pades]

As most autistic people (and any others who by virtue of a disability tend to make loud noises uncontrollably) are not in wheelchairs this is neither here nor there, it would rather seem to suggest that the cab requires an improved level of sound insulation from the passenger area. Or that, as I've said before, the "silent cab" needs to go away and drivers need to be allowed to listen to music or similar.

I agree with the first part of your comment.

I disagree with the second part. Listening to music or similar is a great way to provide some distraction and decrease concentration. All focus must be on the task at hand. Also, other reason listed by others that I don't need to repeat.

 

[atraindriver]

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[Esker-pades]

Why does the industry permit (a) non-air-conditioned cabs and (b) passenger use of mobile-phones immediately behind cabs, then?

I have no idea. It is deeply tedious.

 

[Domh245]

I disagree with the second part. Listening to music or similar is a great way to provide some distraction and decrease concentration. All focus must be on the task at hand. Also, other reason listed by others that I don't need to repeat.

In some respects, yes, but my experience on long motorway drives (~12hrs) is that having some sort of music or podcast, or even other people to talk to helped to break up the monotony of the road and to maintain focus. It is certainly something that is worth looking at to reduce fatigue related incidents, even if they decide against it.

 

[Bletchleyite]

In some respects, yes, but my experience on long motorway drives (~12hrs) is that having some sort of music or podcast, or even other people to talk to helped to break up the monotony of the road and to maintain focus. It is certainly something that is worth looking at to reduce fatigue related incidents, even if they decide against it.

Listening to music is *recommended* for improving car driver attentiveness by reducing boredom.

What makes rail different?

 

[Esker-pades]

In some respects, yes, but my experience on long motorway drives (~12hrs) is that having some sort of music or podcast, or even other people to talk to helped to break up the monotony of the road and to maintain focus. It is certainly something that is worth looking at to reduce fatigue related incidents, even if they decide against it.

The ~12 hours slightly negates this. As far as I know, no single railway driver has to go for longer than 4.5 hours straight (Inverness to Wick, someone give me a longer example) without a break.
Monotony of the road is the other thing I will take issue with. There's a lot more one has to concentrate on when driving a train compared to driving a car.

 

[bubieyehyeh]

I've seen people with a reserved seat, sitting in the unreserved one next to it, to try and avoid having someone sat next to them. Some of these anti-social people are cheeky enough to point out the seat is reserved if someone attempt to use the reserved seat on which their bag is sitting.

 

[atraindriver]

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[Esker-pades]

I can drive for 5h15 without a break, unless you consider changing ends to be a break.

Shorter journeys just mean you do more trips before you get a meaningful break; it doesn't mean you get lots of breaks...

Do you mind saying the route(s) that that covers?

 

[Mag_seven]

I was on 800305 this morning (1P12 Hereford - Paddington), the seat reservation ‘traffic light’ system was actually up & running.
Between Oxford & Reading, out of 6 seats showing ‘Red - unavailable’ there were only two occupied. The other 4 were unoccupied the entire time I was in that carriage.

The seat in front of me had a yellow light with “available to Oxford, unavailable between Oxford & Paddington”, this clicked to red as we came to a stand in the platform at Oxford. This seat was still unoccupied by Reading. I suspect as this was the second coach from the rear and quite well down the Platform, the person concerned probably just boarded the first coach nearest the ticket barrier / doors and plonked themselves in to the first seat they found.

Non occupation of reserved seats seems to be endemic on GWR. Only this evening I was on a London bound GWR HST and I sat in an empty bay of four seats all which were reserved from earlier in the journey to Paddington.

 

[atraindriver]

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